Peter Barnes

It is possible for a company to pursue multiple bottom lines if it’s closely held by a group of like-minded shareholders--that was the case at my former company, Working Assets. But once a corporation goes public--that is, sells stock to strangers—the die is pretty much cast. Strangers want a stock that will rise when they plunk down their money, and profit is the sure path to doing that. It’s just a matter of time, then, until the profit-maximizing algorithm kicks in.

When capitalism started, nature was abundant and capital was scarce; it thus made sense to reward capital above all else. Today we’re awash in capital and literally running out of nature. We’re also losing many social arrangements that bind us together as communities and enrich our lives in nonmonetary ways. This doesn’t mean capitalism is doomed or useless, but it does mean we have to modify it. We have to adapt it to the twenty-first century rather than the eighteenth. And that can be done.

How do you revise a system as vast and complex as capitalism? And how do you do it gracefully, with a minimum of pain and disruption? The answer is, you do what Bill Gates does: you upgrade the operating system.